Development of an Affimer-antibody combined immunological diagnosis kit for glypican-3

Sci Rep. 2017 Aug 29;7(1):9608. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-10083-w.

Abstract

Glypican-3 (GPC3) is a promising new marker for hepatocellular carcinoma, but the reported values for serum GPC3 differ markedly between currently available kits. Here we isolated Affimer non-antibody binding proteins against GPC3 by phage display and developed a new sandwich chemiluminescence immunoassay (CLIA) combining an Affimer with a monoclonal antibody (Affimer-MAb CLIA). The proposed CLIA assay demonstrated a wide linear range 0.03-600 ng/mL) with a good linear correlation coefficient (0.9999), a high detection limitation (0.03 ng/mL) and specificity (0-0.002%) for detection of GPC3. The accuracy, hook effect and stability were demonstrated to be satisfactory. The mean level of GPC3 in serum was higher (>8.5 fold, P < 0.001) in hepatocellular carcinoma patients compared to healthy and other liver disease individuals. A poor correlation (correlation coefficients ranged from -0.286 to 0.478) was observed through pairwise comparison within different kits. However, only this newly developed CLIA test showed high specificity and correlated with the "gold standard" GPC3-immunohistochemistry. This study indicates that Affimer-MAb CLIA can be used to generate a sensitive immunodiagnostic kit, which offers the potential for a highly specific clinically-relevant detection system.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Antibodies, Monoclonal / immunology*
  • Biomarkers, Tumor
  • Carcinoma, Hepatocellular / diagnosis
  • Carcinoma, Hepatocellular / metabolism
  • Glypicans / immunology*
  • Humans
  • Immunoassay / methods*
  • Immunoassay / standards
  • Liver Neoplasms / diagnosis
  • Liver Neoplasms / metabolism
  • ROC Curve
  • Reagent Kits, Diagnostic*
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sensitivity and Specificity

Substances

  • Antibodies, Monoclonal
  • Biomarkers, Tumor
  • GPC3 protein, human
  • Glypicans
  • Reagent Kits, Diagnostic